(PRWEB) January 27, 2006 -- Perched on a hilltop above Evergreen, Colorado, in a complex known as Artisans Park, Becoming Tile, LLC makes history this week when the 4300 square foot glass mosaic mural it fabricated is installed on the Wing Lung Bank in Alhambra, the burgeoning financial mecca just east of downtown Los Angeles. The mural is 35 feet high and 129 feet long. It consists of nearly 1,000,000 three-quarter-inch Chinese and Italian glass tiles, and envelopes the elliptical façade and a portion of the interior that leads to the atrium. Abstract in design, the original artwork created by Neil Seth Levine is reminiscent of the mountainous landscapes that are often the subject of traditional Chinese paintings. The metal filaments in the Bisazza Tile and the vast palette of Kaleidoscope Vitreous Glass Tile glimmer in the sun and contribute a sense of movement and depth to the ingenious and dynamic mural.
“ Currently, with 14 employees we are able to fabricate as much as 3000 square feet in a week. ”
Becoming Tile is the brainchild of Keith DeWald, who holds a degree in Computer Science from College of Engineering, University of Florida at Gainesville and was a software engineer for 22 years before moving to Colorado in 1987 after accepting a position with Ampex-Switcher Division. It was during a home remodeling project that DeWald became aware of the wide variety of small tiles available and immediately realized that the tiles could be utilized as pixels. “Basically, I've taken advanced techniques of image processing learned in the video industry and applied them to the custom software I devised to convert images into tile mosaics.” While the Wing Lung Bank mosaic mural is on a grand scale, Becoming Tile has fabricated a variety of smaller, but no less impressive, projects. “No job is too large or too small,” DeWald says. “Currently, with 14 employees we are able to fabricate as much as 3000 square feet in a week. This will allow us to expand into other areas of design, including hotels and restaurants, casinos, civil and public art projects, as well as residential elements. In fact, our next project is fabricating mosaic murals from one of Monet’s Water Lilly paintings and an abstract by Paul Klee for clients who are building a luxury home in Costa Rica. With the technology I’ve developed, there is no limit to the applications of this format.”
The Wing Lung Bank was designed by Tsang Architecture of San Francisco. This is the first collaborative effort between Neil Seth Levine, Vivek Anand, and Becoming Tile, LLC. The installation is being done by Glenn Harris, World Class Pools, Hawaii. The tile was supplied by Mosaic Tile Supplies of Cold Springs, Texas and Bisazza USA of Miami, Florida.
Projects fabricated by Becoming Tile, LLC include:
Centennial Plaza – Montrose, Colorado - 140-foot-long symbolic tribute to the Gunnison River;
640 square foot abstract mosaic for a coffee house floor in West Virginia;
A mural of a Day Lily on the bottom of a swimming pool in Houston, Texas;
A mural of the New York Skyline for an apartment building in Kansas City, Missouri;
A mural of Monet's Water Lillies for a luxury home in Costa Rica.
